Are you ready to turn the heat up a couple of notches? This article is going
to be my most challenging and painful aggravation of your orthodoxy. Because
my job is to empower you to get higher, which is a very different imperative
than "spend more money". My job is to suggest new fashions in thinking about
your search for beauty. This is not easy because the "normal" American audio
ego is flaccid, and does not have the intellectual right stuff to deal with
the rich and erotic complexities of the audio arts.

LEVELS OF MUSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

According to the January 9, 2001, New York Times article, Sonata for Humans,Birds and Humpback Whales, by Natalie Angier, the force of musical
consciousness, the ability of DNA to communicate with rhythmic patterns of
sound, existed hundreds of millions of years before shit-hurling over sexed
apes decided to get down from the trees to make beer, play baseball, and create
rock and roll.

Musical consciousness, less than one hundred years ago, decided to use male
DNA, to get higher, and wider. So this force hooked up with electricity, and
created the vacuum tube, and the rest is history. Every audio artisan can
trace his roots back to the Triode Big Bang in 1907.

This is how musical consciousness evolves its intention through human DNA:
it chooses a very small group to do its relentless escalation work by
endowing this chosen group with nano-harmonic musical consciousness while
billions of others, and, most in the audio industry, are completely clueless
about this genetic impulse to ponder the nano-level of existence. How can
I be so certain that this is how the process works: if you feel it, you express
it. If you don't feel it, you are passive. That is the bottom line.

So how do you know you are a chosen one? Just check out what your brain is
doing and you have no control over it. Why is The Tube Matrix,
the name above the door of this exclusive male club? This is the place where
this rare type of music mind hangs; the mind that wrestles with the intersection
of technology and music so it can do what it must do .exercise
its ontological imperative the exploration of the nano-harmonic level
of musical experience. If you are getting a slight eye twitch, let me calm
you down.

You are not alone. Why do men build instruments that can detect the Big Bang,
an event that occurred a gillion years ago? Why do we build electron microscopes
to see the atomic structure of Kryptonite? Why is the nano-aroma, and nano-flavor,
of wine, tobacco, coffee, and a million other gourmet delights so important?
Why does a sculptor spend days hand polishing twelve inches of marble to achieve
a nano-harmonic of luster? Why do marksmen measure the weight of their bullets
to the 4th decimal point? Why does a thousandth of an inch matter
in tuning a Weber carburetor? Why does a poet rack his brain over one word,
for a month? Why does a painter grind his own pigments, rather than buying
a tube of paint to capture the nano-harmonic of color and texture? Why do
men care so much about the varnish they use on the violins they make? Why
are the nano-harmonics of sartorial silk so important to Englishmen? Why do
some fishermen raise their own chickens so that they can have the perfect
feather to tie their dry flies? Why do pious men debate what God meant in
a single line in the Bible?

Why do you care so much about how the difference one carbon or metal oxide
resistor can make in your tube aural matrix? Why does the tonal difference
of silver and copper cause you to loose sleep? Why are you ready to spend
more for a single capacitor than on a new TV? Why are you searching the Internet
for tube amps that were made before you were born? Why do you lust after 1944
NOS 6SN7s? Why do you sit at your desk at work and ponder speaker magnets
instead of counting beans? Why do you debate your friends about White cathode
followers? Why do you salivate when listening to obsolete recording mediums?
Why must you adjust the VTA of your cartridge? Is it worth loosing sleep over
the difference between C, R and E core output transformers? Is it true that
grown men are ready to duel to the death about an illusion?

Or, to put this another way Why do certain men hang out at topless bars,
others at sports bars, others at the Oak Room of the Plaza, and others drink
beer on a fire escape? The answer is, again: we hang out with our fellow aliens,
where we are loved, appreciated, accepted, and can wrestle with our bros'
mind, while expressing our genius.

Or to put this another way what kind of mind is devoted to the meticulous
nano-zone of illusion? Is it possible that The Tube Matrix is a new virtual
Wholey Commune?

WHY DOES GOD COMPELL WHOLEY MEN TO CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THE DETAILS?

The often used expression "God is in the Details", should be "If you want
to have a religious experience, think nano". This synchronistic truth about
men's spiritual life and their love of tools, arises out of our four million-year-old
males DNA that either paid attention to the nano, or got eaten. Because survival
depends on these minute details, we are ready to get into a fist fight over
which is the best 300B.

But step backs over the edge and considers this: We are acting out the archetype
of the sorcerers: we pour our souls into, and are relentless in our search
for a more refined and magical illusion. We scratch at crevices of
time to uncover ancient plate chokes, directly heated triodes our grandfather
worshiped, strange metallurgy, extinct woods. No rules, no pundit, no keepers
of the broo ha ha, can restrain our assault on the boundaries beaudacity.

REBELS WITH A CAUSE

Show a healthy boy a fence, and tell him not to jump over it, because
he has no business on the other side, and I bet you my favorite Spider Man
Pez Dispenser, that this boy does the right thing he will jump over the
fence.

I have just described the nitty gritty rebellion in the audio arts the Internet
inspired it transformed legions of men who, after decades of being obedient
fence respecters, into healthy boys again into high jumpers and
the orthodoxy will never recover because once you have come out of the
confines of your audiophile closet, and have your first experience of your
nano-harmonic genius which is very easy to experience with tubes .
well, it is just like the first time you had sex with a sheep .there
is no going back to inflatable dolls.

Can I say that another way? Tubes are the tools, which liberates and celebrates
the work that the rare nano-harmonic mind must do.

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED by the same forceful energy, and we are
MAN AT HIS BEST, because our intention is to share, escalate, and educate,
as we wrestle with each other on the up escalator. How high will this escalator
take us? Higher than anyone can describe with words, because that is the fundamental
paradox of music nano-consciousness it is a heroic effort to redefine
the inherently inarticulate edge of knowledge..

In 1943, T. S. Eliot, who only listened to tubes, wrote this poetic passage
after his first experience with a Mazda PX 25 directly heated triode:

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating .

Elliot is obviously referring here, according to Ken Kessler, to the problem
that every English audiomaniac had during WWII with deteriorating rectifier
tubes.

Elliot was so inspired by this experience he went on to write, his most famous
"epic" poem, East Coker, which I personally believe is a celebration
of the audio art's paradoxes. Read it for yourself and let me know your opinion.

MY CLOSING CUNNING

An often-heard mantra is "What is wrong with the audio industry". My answer
is: We need more grass roots gonzo gifted amateur audio artisan's with nano-harmonic
minds doing their thing.

In every other field of male passion from fishing, cars, motorcycles, cars,
woodworking, painting, firearms, cooking, computers in every "tools of
ecstasy" domain, at the center is THE INSPIRATIONAL AMATEUR, the gonzo grass
roots amateur artist, who has struggled to express the genius of his nano-harmonic
mind. Aren't hot rods more compelling than a Volvo station wagon? Would you
rather read about a restored 1941 Woody Station wagon or new Ford? History
is proof that gifted amateurs, meaning living breathing humans, are more inspirational
than big black boxes. The Tube Matrix wants more of this type of vitality.
Why do Japanese audio magazine celebrates the gonzo audio Samurai and his
1950s American tube gear?

As F.D.R, who only listened to tube gear, said " The only thing we
have to fear, is our fear of beauty.